Birds of Prey

I’ve previously bemoaned the superhero/villain origin stories relaying ancestral history in moving relief—Asimovian technology so advanced it resembles magic.  BIRDS OF PREY ditches the fancy and goes for the shmancy: a two-dimensional, cartoon crash course in the childhood of reformed psychiatrist-turned-criminal enforcer Harleen Quinzel, a.k.a. Harley Quinn—orphaned over a can of beer.  I like that the Batmenagerie brims with characters whose names were thought up on the spot.  You’ve got to be a billionaire with an erudite butler to come up with something as sophisticated as Batman.  But this story belongs not to him, nor his cackling arch-nemesis.

The break-up of Harley Quinn and Joker, set to Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself For Loving You,” revisits Margot Robbie’s spectacular catharsis in I, TONYA.  She takes up roller derby to wring out her rage.  Introduced in 1935 by Leo Seltzer as a variation on marathon skating, roller derby offered a rare outlet for women to participate in a competitive, professional sport, despite exclusion from all others.

BIRDS passes many feminist signposts along the journey of its principals, including Rosie Perez as Officer Renee Montoya—who talks like she’s in an 80’s cop show, as several characters are all too happy to remind her.  While investigating the assassination of a mob leader, Montoya picks up Quinn’s trail from the nearby fire-bombing of Ace Chemical—Joker’s processing plant for his weaponized concoctions and the birthplace of his (and her) bleached visage.

A nightclub singer at the end of irascible gangster Roman Sionis’ (Ewan McGregor as the Black Mask) leash, Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell as the Black Canary) becomes entangled in a plot to recover a 30-carat diamond.  The gem contains microscopic, laser-etched data of Gotham’s largest crime familiy’s offshore accounts.   Lance chases down a pickpocket, Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) who pinched the rock from Sionis’ hench-boyfriend, Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina).  She and Harley cross paths just before Sionis kidnaps the Joker’s former squeeze; she’s no longer off-limits from harm at the hands of Gotham’s many criminals.

But in this non-linear narrative, a hurly-burly of Harley’s recollections, back to the assassination we go.  The police suspect a vigilante the cops call The Cross Bow Killer.  Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) really hates that name.  Straight out of a Tarantino pastiche of network serials, in childhood she absconds to Sicily, where she becomes a one woman hit squad.  Zack Snyder would zig where Yan zags, and make this backstory dark, gritty… dumb.  Instead, we get to see what happens when a woman focuses.  She grows up to be a nerd who practices, “Do you know who I am?” in the mirror again and again.

This is director Cathy Yan’s light touch at work in her sophomore follow-up to the acclaimed DEAD PIGS.   Despite the Canary’s standard buy-your-freedom-from-the-gangster conundrum, the story explores intertwined themes of agency and rage.  The “super”- in the hero (or villain) manifests not in a performative alter-ego, but in occasionally coke-fueled outbursts of rage that unlock opposing manifestations of super-human potential: women wresting their internal agency from the external control of men.  Sionis’ totemizes his rage in the appropriation of cultural history as curios in his apartment.  Looking at a shrunken head, he tells us, “He’s a thousand years old and now he’s just an ornament in my living room.”

On the wall of his loft, a mural depicts several women in bondage, tied to one another, with the last woman’s face obscured by rope.  One might have to interpret his open homosexuality through a Hellenic lens.  He doesn’t love men so much as he thinks of women as possessions like curios in his living room—a direct response to the incel undertones of Todd Phillips’ JOKER.

Apropos, in spite of the formulaic constraints of the male-dominated genre, BIRDS OF PREY soars, swoops, glides, dive-bombs, and sings.  Still, Harley, now free of the clown, leaves us with an unresolved psychoanalysis:  Her two protectors are a (baseball) bat and a menacing hyena named Bruce.

The enemy of my enemy…